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Parolee continues fight for exoneration

Going unnoticed in a crowd of more than 100 people at a packed Austin theater, Anna Vasquez watched her story unfold on screen.

She was seated in between her sister and her mother to make sure no children ended up close to her.

Vasquez, recently paroled and living back home in San Antonio, made her first public appearance Thursday at the Vanguard Theater for a “work-in-progress” screening of a documentary by filmmaker Deborah Esquenazi, an Austin resident.

She, along with her former girlfriend Cassandra Rivera, and their friends Elizabeth Ramirez and Kristie Mayhugh, have been fighting to clear their names in a bizarre 1994 sex assault case.

Ramirez’s two nieces, then 7 and 9, accused all four women of attacking and raping them with objects when the girls visited Ramirez’s apartment in the summer of that year. They were all arrested and convicted of aggravated sexual assault of a child.

Ramirez was tried separately and got 37 ½ years in prison. Her three friends were tried together and were sentenced to 15 years, which began in 2000 after they lost their only appeal.

Esquenazi saved Vasquez’s presence at the screening as a surprise for the audience, many of whom are working in the exoneration efforts.

She introduced her to resounding applause and Vasquez, at times wiping tears from her eyes, held up pictures of her three friends.

“They can’t be here but I brought them with me,” she said.

Even the families of her friends, Rivera and Ramirez, didn’t realize she would be there. Gloria Herrera, Ramirez’s mom, took her in her arms and lovingly patted her cheek.

Because of the stringent parole restrictions, Vasquez kept a distance from Rivera’s daughter Ashley Chavira, 20, because she brought her own daughter, Aliana, who is just 15 months old.

Aliana wore a shirt with her grandma’s photo on the front with the words “I love my grandma” scrawled in pink.

Rivera’s son Michael and the matriarch of the family, Margaret Rivera, all sat together in the front row at the screening.

Featured in the screenings is a segment following Michael after he recorded a song for his mom that he also performed at this year’s gay pride festival.

The Express-News was also interviewed for the documentary and portions of that interview are included in the screenings. The paper took a critical look at the case in 2010 and has followed the developments since then.

But the star of the night was Vasquez.

“It’s really overwhelming,” she said after Esquenazi set up a panel of experts from the film to discuss the case. “We have so much to look forward to now that we have all these supporters and advocates involved.”

The group assembled included Mike Ware, the attorney for the women, along with Jeff Blackburn, head of the Innocence Project of Texas and Debbie Nathan, a reporter who co-founded the National Center for Research and Justice, an advocacy non-profit that also helping in the case.

The panel created some heated debate about how child sex assault cases and how they are handled by the justice system. The point of the screenings is to help foster conversation.

Overall, Esquenazi was “very pleased with the attendance,” she said in a phone interview on Friday.

“My biggest fear was that nobody would show up. I had this surprise, Anna…I wanted it to go perfect for her. That was big for me.”

There was a minor technical glitch with her DVD player that caused much anxiety for her but it was fixed and the screening proceeded with no other issues.

Esquenazi finds herself in unfamiliar territory, she said, because she has taken a side and made her opinion known—she wants to help in the exoneration efforts.

“It’s really, really hard,” she said. “We are taught as journalists and documentarians to be unbiased and all about objectivity.”

But for her the case “hits close to home,” she added. Esquenazi is a lesbian and married to a woman who runs a non-profit organization that teaches people how to be “creative allies,” those that help stand up against bullies and for the rights of those who are marginalized.

Her wife told her that she had an opportunity to be one of the creative allies and Esquenazi decided to do just that.

The four women were lesbians when accused or had been in a same sex relationship and they believe that played a part in the case.

Esquenazi didn’t make the decision lightly because she was dealing with sex abuse of children. She said there was a part of her at the beginning that thought “what if they did do it?” But after digging into the case she said she became convinced of the women’s innocence.

The screenings—this was the second in Austin and there has been one in San Antonio—are part fundraiser and part cheerleading sessions to help with the exoneration efforts.

For Ashley, it’s comforting to know that her mom has so many people trying to help her. When the Express-News first interviewed the family for the 2010 story Rivera’s daughter decided she didn’t want to be interviewed.

She was nervous about how the story would portray the case and her mom. But now that she too is a mother she said she understands even more how difficult this has been for Rivera.

“It would kill me if I had to spend all that time away,” she said. “My mom missed so many important events in my life — my pregnancy, every development with my daughter.”

Seeing Vasquez brought back a flood of memories. She helped Rivera raise her children.
“I called her my big teddy bear,” Chavira said. “She was always there for us.”

Vasquez remembers that. She also recalls the moniker, “my Anna.”

“I never wanted to take the place of their parents so it was always just ‘my Anna.’”

In an interview the day after the screening, Vasquez said she thought the footage was powerful and she was grateful to all the people in the theater. The goal, she said, is to help her friends.

“I’m ready to take this on,” Vasquez said. “I’m ready to be the girls’ voice. I think it will actually help for me to share what I’ve been through. And maybe (the public) can get a better understanding of what we’re up against and how far something like this can go and how devastating this is. It doesn’t just affect me it affects my family as well as the others’ families.”